Non-recurring engineering (NRE) generally refers to non-reoccurring (e.g., one-time) costs associated with researching, developing, designing, verifying, and testing a new product. Integrated circuit (IC) or chip manufacturers may incur significant NRE costs when developing a new IC or chip. For example, a chip design process may utilize various electronic design automation (EDA) tools and other mechanisms for testing or verifying a chip design prior to silicon fabrication and/or mass production.
To minimize costs associated with testing or verifying chip designs, some manufacturers use field-programmable gate array (FPGA) prototyping for testing application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or system on a chip (SoC) designs prior to silicon fabrication. However, even using FPGA prototyping and/or conventional EDA tools, some chip design issues, including power consumption issues and/or overheating, may be difficult to ascertain or may not be ascertained early enough to avoid significant wasted resources.